It concerns and disgusts me that there are some folks in North America who are taking a perverse pleasure in the fallout and the collapse of the ruble. Part of the beauty of hockey at its best is its ability to transcend borders and politics.

A quarter century after the end of the Cold War and decades after the signing of landmark nuclear arms control and disarmament agreements, are the U.S. and Russian governments once more engaged in a potentially disastrous nuclear arms race with one another?

The removal from Syria of the Assad regime's stockpile of chemical weapons shows that joint efforts can yield positive results. Likewise, by agreeing to extend the international negotiations on Iran's nuclear program, the parties to the talks have kept alive the promise of a final deal, which would be a great victory for multilateral diplomacy.

Ordinary citizens remain calm because of the simple fact that they typically do not know the full picture -- nor do they try to know it. It is easier to live that way. Just the same, it is time to wake up and recognize what is happening. This is no Hollywood blockbuster unfolding outside our windows, but a force majeure of international proportions. True, it is not the first that the world has experienced, but knowing what hardships previous conflicts have brought to mankind should motivate us to try to prevent any more from occurring.

After imposing a "full embargo" on imports from the West, Russia has made it clear that the latest sanctions are politically motivated. Russians are likely to lose access to certain items that have long stopped being viewed as Western luxuries.

Before this war in Ukraine claims more victims and sends U.S.-Russian relations into a deep freeze, both Obama and Putin need to realize that both sides benefit a great deal more from cooperation than confrontation.

As Ukraine recoils from Russia's intense military pressure, I wonder whether democracy will indeed triumph when the history of the Cold War is written, or whether Russia specifically, and authoritarianism more generally, will prove the more powerful force.

Although she does not explicitly endorse his views, Angela Stent notes that Dmitri Trenin, "one of Russia's most astute foreign policy observers," believes that his country has pressed its own reset button.

The United States expects Syria's chemical weapons to be destroyed "even faster than the very ambitious goal" of June 30 set in the U.S.-Russian agreement reached in Geneva in September, according to top U.S. negotiator Thomas Countryman.